Category: Lists

Last week I came across Amanda Arnold’s recent Lit Hub piece, “Why Literature and Pop Culture Still Can’t Get the Midwest Right.” As a born-Midwesterner, I instantly and intuitively understood what she meant by her title. Her ideas stayed with me, and the more I thought about it, the easier it was to think of pop culture—movies, TV, books—that missed the mark and managed to make unfamiliar terrain out of my everyday experience. Turns out there are too many of those to count (and what fun is that anyway?). So, instead, what about the films that got home right? I had...

American film studios have a less than stellar track record in terms of adapting anime and manga. Not only are the released adaptations almost universally disappointing (Dragonball: Evolution, Speed Racer, and even a straight-to-video Fist of the North Star movie have, probably for the best, mostly faded from public memory) even more have been in development for years, such as Akira, Death Note, Gunm, and Cowboy Bebop. In the past decade, studios have seen the lucrative and creative potential of comic book adaptations. To branch out more seriously into anime properties could be fruitful in many ways. That’s not to...

With the news that Alicia Vikander has turned down the role of Lisbeth Salander in Fede Alvarez’s upcoming Girl in the Spider’s Web, we decided to put forth some casting ideas of our own, in no particular order. Some seem like easy replacements, and others more of a challenge, but now is a good a time as any to completely refresh the continuation of the wildly successful Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. Elizabeth Olsen Elizabeth Olsen is just one example of a talented actor who has been captured by the superhero universe with little time or energy to...

It’s been a tough two weeks. We here at AE sort of lean on each other like family and, needless to say, we have had to do a bit more leaning than usual as of late. Anxiety is, for us and many others, at an all-time high. Recently, we started discussing what movies we watch in moments of great stress to help comfort ourselves. Out of curiosity, I opened that line of discussion to our Twitter audience. The response was pretty overwhelming. When compiling everyone’s answer into a list, it seems, with a few lax interpretations and maybe some...

There’s really no need for an introduction or for us to tell you how powerful David Bowie’s music is, how it stretched across generations and electrified all of our odd bits and ultimately made us feel more alive in our strangeness. We’ve spent the better part of a year celebrating his eternal greatness and re-listening to his music, a gift which has aided so many of us in our quest to put words down on the page and twist our imagination in new ways until they become reality. To celebrate David Bowie’s creativity and genius, we’ve decided to pay...

Each year here at Audiences Everywhere, I like to take some time during our end-of-year celebrations to look at things that don’t quite fit into any of our other Best Of categories. As we’ve grown to include a greater variety of lists, I’ve had to stretch the definition of “Almost Film” past its breaking point. I could go on about how the definition of cinema itself is becoming more and more unstable, and how the combination of various mediums requires a more open-minded approach, but I’ll spare you. This is just a list of stuff I liked in 2016,...

It’s that time of year again. With Star Wars growing and growing with each week bringing more news about future installments, whether to the main series of the spin-off series, we’ve decided to give you five more spin-offs we would like to see get made. If what Disney is seeing is true and this franchise will last forever. then chances are you’ll get to see all these movies get made eventually. Ahsoka Tano Ahsoka is a character introduced in The Clone Wars who quickly became a fan favourite. She is the young padawan of Anakin Skywalker who picks up...

George Miller’s masterpiece Mad Mad: Fury Road was recently re-released in cinemas around the world, converted in black and white, or rather black and chrome. The new version, much like the old version, is incredible, and the conversion works so well that after the first two minutes you forget you’re watching a black and white movie. There are actually scenes, like the war rig passing through the crow’s swampland, that are improved with the lack of colour. This got us thinking about what movies would benefit from the monochrome treatment and we’ve put together five here for you Looper Rian Johnson’s...

“I love magic,” Harry Potter says as he stares in amazement at how the power of magic can turn this little tent into this accommodating big top. Truly, the cinematic depiction of J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World is something to behold, not solely for its epic adventures and enthralling world-building but also for what lies within – the emotional sincerity in character introspection. The Harry Potter film series is definitely a unique series in that it introduces our main characters as they’re in their prepubescent childhood stage and ends their stories as they reach adulthood. This makes the film series...

It is difficult for many Americans to understand how the United States democracy works. This presidential election, in particular, has caused many of us to ask ourselves, “How the hell did we end up here?” Thus, we can only imagine how nonsensical this circus must seem to our friends from other countries. To help contextualize this U.S. election and explain American democracy in general, we have put together a list of movies about American politics. After viewing these, you may still have questions about the how, but will better understand why America is so… American. Bob Roberts (1992) Bob...

Marvel’s Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg recently revealed via Variety that for the next installment of Netflix’s smash hit, will feature only female directors to helm all 13 episodes of Season 2. While we wait for a list of the directors working on Jessica Jones, I created a list of some of the women I’d like to see at the helm of the second season of the series. Jennifer Kent Australian native Jennifer Kent made her directorial debut with The Babadook, showcasing her deft ability to explore emotion through horror. Many aspects of Jessica Jones could be classified as...

For the past two years, Audiences Everywhere has compiled a list of relatively tame and child-friendly horror movies to watch on Halloween. This year, we’ve decided to up the scariness factor on these movies just a little in order to help you overcome your fears and maybe learn a few life lessons along the way. Shaun of the Dead Depicted through the eyes of our frivolous main characters, Shaun of the Dead’s zombie apocalypse is perhaps so terrifying because of the way it catches our main characters by surprise, even though the signs were right in front of them....

You don’t have to be a horror fanatic to be horrified by film. For #hAElloween, we asked our staff and readers about the scariest scene they ever saw within a non-horror film. You can read their answers below and add yours in the comments. The Matrix In 1999, The Matrix was released; I was 11 and not ready for it at all both as a movie and as a basic introduction to philosophy. The fear starts when Neo wakes violently in a vat of gelatinous goo (liquefied dead people, we later find out.) Covered in sockets and holes, he becomes...

With the success of Universal’s Ouija franchise, we got to thinking about other board games that would make for great horror movies directed by some of the genre’s biggest names. Parents and guardians, feel free to thank us later. Tobe Hooper’s Guess Who Six strangers wake up in a derelict house. Taped to the wall are 24 photographs of people close to each of these six people—four for each person. Above them is a metal grate where they can see a figure dressed all in black, and a chair with a figure draped in a sheet tied to it....

Not everyone has what it takes to sit through 90-120 minutes of a horror film. Maybe you like the available time, or the long-term courage. In either event, if you’re looking to be scared in small doses, we have just the thing for you: the second installment of our series that captures YouTube videos scarier than horror films. You can catch the first installment here, and a new set of ten nightmare videos below. “Don’t Talk, Just Listen” Paul Michael Stephani was a serial killer who took the lives of five women in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The video above collects the...